Felicity Meakins

Gurindji Kriol: A Mixed Language Emerges from Code-switching

1. IntroductionBakker (2003: 129) claims that ‘mixed languages’ do not arise from code-switching.The language spoken most frequently by Gurindji people between the ages of 3 andabout 45, termed ‘Gurindji Kriol’ here, is a counter-example to this generalization.This language is made up of elements of Kriol, an English based creole spoken acrossthe middle of the Northern Territory of Australia; and Gurindji, the traditionallanguage of a group in the west of this region (Dalton et al. 1995; McConvell 2002).The previous generation spoke both these languages fluently, but the most prevalenttype of speech involved intersentential and intrasentential code-switching. Whilechoice of language in code-switching among middle-aged and older people in the1970s

Spaced Out: Intergenerational Changes in the Expression of Spatial Relations by Gurindji People

Gurindji Kriol is a mixed language spoken by Gurindji people at Kalkaringi in northern Australia. It has retained many of the features of Gurindji including case-marking, many other nominal suffixes (inflectional and derivational) and significant portions of vocabulary (including nouns and coverbs). It has also lost many features of Gurindji including inflecting verbs and bound pronouns. Other systems have also been significantly affected by language contact. For example, although the Gurindji cardinal direction system is in evidence, it is greatly reduced both inflectionally and functionally. Where the paradigm of Gurindji cardinals contains 28 inflected forms for each cardinal direction and these are used pervasively to describe large and small-scale space, Gurindji Kriol contains at most four inflected forms for each cardinal direction and they are only used for descriptions of large-scale space. Despite this reduction in the use of Gurindji cardinal directions, Gurindji Kriol has not replaced or supplemented this system with Kriol cardinal terms or with the English left/right system. Instead Gurindji Kriol favours deictic terms and gesture to express spatial relations. Yet deixis and gesture are only useful in so far as the speaker and hearer can see each other. The final part of this paper presents the results of a ‘Man and tree’ task which was conducted at Kalkaringi with 11 Gurindji Kriol participants and six Gurindji participants. The task was designed specifically to reveal strategies of spatial description in small-scale space where the speakers and hearers view of each other is obscured. What emerges from this test is the pervasive use of cardinal directions and the suggestion that the mental map of younger Gurindji people is still based on fixed bearings despite the paucity of cardinal directions in natural discourse.

Variation in Voice Onset Time in Stops in Gurindji Kriol: Picture Naming and Conversational Speech

Gurindji Kriol is the home language of children and adults under about 40 years of age in the traditionally Gurindji-speaking communities of northern Australia. Nearly all words in Gurindji Kriol are derived from Gurindji or from Kriol, both of which have been described as lacking a stop voicing contrast, at least in basilectal varieties in the case of Kriol. In this study, we describe variation in voice onset time in Gurindji Kriol, in both picture naming and in conversational speech by young Gurindji Kriol speaking women. For picture naming, Australian English comparison data are also reported. The results indicate that in Gurindji Kriol, VOT varies systematically in expected ways by place of articulation, and position in word and utterance, but not according to the phonological voicing category of cognate English words. Initial stops tend to have short-lag VOT of up to 30 ms; values can be longer in English code-switched forms. Medial stops tend to have negative VOT. The present data do not suggest a voicing contrast based on VOT.

How Much Input Is Enough? Correlating Comprehension and Child Language Input in an Endangered Language.

Abstract In situations of language endangerment, the ability to understand a language tends to persevere longer than the ability to speak it. As a result, the possibility of language revival remains high even when few speakers remain. Nonetheless, this potential requires that those with high levels of comprehension received sufficient input as children for the activation of speech to occur in later life. In many areas of Australia, input to children of traditional Aboriginal languages is rarely monolingual, but rather often mixed with a contact variety of English. Thus, it is not clear whether children receive enough input to later become active speakers of the traditional languages. This paper reports on a study which tested the relationship between language comprehension and child language input. A vocabulary test of 40 items was administered to 52 Gurindji participants in five age groups. Participants were asked to listen to a Gurindji word and choose a corresponding picture. The test items were graded as high, medium or low frequency on the basis of their use in a corpus of Gurindji child-input speech. We found that age and frequency of use in child-directed speech significantly altered the chance of a correct response.

Comparing vowels in Gurindji Kriol and Katherine English: citation speech data

Gurindji Kriol is the home language of children and adults under about 40 years of age in traditionally Gurindji speaking communities of northern Australia. For phonetics and phonology, a significant aspect of the mixed language status of Gurindji Kriol is that, in running speech, approximately two-thirds of word tokens are Kriol-derived, and one-third are Gurindji-derived. In this study, we describe vowel pronunciation in the Kriol-derived words relative to their English cognates, by comparing picture-prompted citation speech from five young Gurindji Kriol speaking women and four young Australian English speaking women from Katherine, the nearest town. The results indicate systematic differences in vowel pronunciation and vowel variability between Gurindji Kriol and Katherine English, in monophthongs and diphthongs. We also consider the vowel variation in these tokens in the context of the likely vowel phoneme inventory in Gurindji Kriol, or the extent of permitted within-category variation in the languages.

A grammar of Bilinarra : an Australian aboriginal language of the Northern Territory

This volume is a grammatical description of Bilinarra, an endangered Australian language. This work draws on materials collected over a 20-year period from the last first-language speakers of the language, most of whom have since passed away. Detailed attention is paid to all aspects of the grammar, with all examples provided with associated sound files.

Typological constraints on verb integration in two Australian mixed languages 1, 2

Abstract Gurindji Kriol and Light Warlpiri are two mixed languages spoken in northern Australia by Gurindji and Warlpiri people, respectively. Both languages are the outcome of the fusion of a contact variety of English (Kriol/Aboriginal English) with a traditional Australian Aboriginal language (Gurindji or Warlpiri). The end result is two languages which show remarkable structural similarity. In both mixed languages, pronouns, TMA auxiliaries and word order are derived from Kriol/Aboriginal English, and case-marking and other nominal morphology come from Gurindji or Warlpiri. These structural similarities are not surprising given that the mixed languages are derived from typologically similar languages, Gurindji and Warlpiri (Ngumpin-Yapa, Pama-Nyungan), and share the Kriol/Aboriginal English component. Nonetheless, one of the more striking differences between the languages is the source of verbs. One third of the verbs in Gurindji Kriol is derived from Gurindji, whereas only seven verbs in Light Warlpiri are of Warlpiri origin. Additionally verbs of Gurindji origin in Gurindji Kriol are derived from coverbs, whereas the Warlpiri verbs in Light Warlpiri come from inflecting verbs. In this paper we claim that this difference is due to differences in the complex verb structure of Gurindji and Warlpiri, and the manner in which these complex verbs have interacted with the verb structure of Kriol/English in the formation of the mixed languages.

Comprehension of competing argument marking systems in two Australian mixed languages

Crosslinguistic influence has been seen in bilingual adult and child learners when compared to monolingual learners. For speakers of Light Warlpiri and Gurindji Kriol there is no monolingual group for comparison, yet crosslinguistic influence can be seen in how the speakers resolve competition between case-marking and word order systems in each language. Light Warlpiri and Gurindji Kriol are two new Australian mixed languages, spoken in similar, yet slightly different, sociolinguistic contexts, and with similar, yet slightly different, argument marking systems. The different sociolinguistic situations and systems of argument marking lead to a difference in how speakers of each language interpret simple transitive sentences in a comprehension task. Light Warlpiri speakers rely on ergative case-marking as an indicator of agents more often than Gurindji Kriol speakers do. Conversely, Gurindji Kriol speakers rely on word order more often than Light Warlpiri speakers do.

Loss and Renewal: Australian Languages Since Colonisation

This book originated from a ‘Language Contact Symposium’ held at The Australian National University in Canberra, 6–7 March 2014, organised by the volume editors as part of an annual Australian Languages Workshop. Although written by linguists and largely for linguists, the book should nevertheless be of interest to students of Aboriginal history. Its topic deals with the after-effects of the European colonisation of the continent, in particular how the advent of English to Australia has impacted on traditional Indigenous languages. Considerable attention has previously been given to the decline and loss of traditional languages, as Indigenous people have given up their languages in favour of English (e.g. Schmidt 1985, 1990; McConvell and Thieberger 2001; Marmion et al. 2014), as well as issues of language maintenance and revitalisation (McKay 1996, Walsh 2014, Hobson et al. 2010).

Possessor dissension: agreement mismatch in Ngumpin-Yapa possessive constructions

Abstract In this article we describe a possessive construction in the Ngumpin-Yapa languages of Australia which has interesting implications for crosslinguistic models of agreement. In this “possessor dissension” construction, the possessor NP remains a modifier within the larger possessive NP, yet both the possessor and the possessum are cross-referenced with clause-level agreement morphology. Thus, there is a type of morphosyntactic disagreement (or dissension) between the syntactic position of the possessor as an NP-internal argument and its being agreed with at the clausal level as if it were a clausal argument. This phenomenon has had only limited mention in the typological literature, and has not previously been discussed for Australian languages. We discuss the properties of the construction, how it can be distinguished from other related construction types, and its implications for the typology of agreement.